Tales of EVA - An NGE retelling
by trekaddict
Summary: 'Don't run away. Don't fail.' A sixteen year old Shinji is called back to Japan from America where he stayed with his uncle. His mother tells him he needs to fight evil monsters. Being who he is, he agrees, and his life will never be the same. Massively, gigantically AU, rated T for Anime violence.
1. Chapter 1

****6th March 2019, 06:ish PM****

****"Let's have a quick look at the 'Various stories' folder."  
*looks*  
"Hmm. Twenty-something subfolders and loose documents. Yeah, I need to cull these. But let's read that random NGE story first."****

*****two days later*****

****"Right, so how do I fix this broken-down clusterfuck of a cast as I can't feed Gendo nuke? TO THE TEAPOT!"  
*starts writing ten minutes later*****

**That's a TL;DR version of how that went. I'm not going to post that three quarters of a page AN here though where I can't hide it with spoiler tags. So yeah, ****Darkness/Mindfuck induced audience apathy, desire to play with the universe and especially those characters anyway. The primary inspiration is JimmyWolk's **_2nd Try_** which can be found on this very website, along with the follow on Webcomic that's still being updated. Check em out if you don't mind early onset tooth rot from all the WAFF.  
**

**Chapter Alfa-One**

He wasn't surprised when there was no one there to pick him up at the train station, nor that he could see that the city was empty of people. When he had stepped off the Shinkansen from Tokyo 2 at the small station in the shadow of Mount Kano and in the middle of nowhere, he'd known that there was one, and only one reason why the MagLev line down towards Shimoda had been a priority for rebuilding and upgrades after the Impact war.

And now he stood in front of it. The entrance to the massive undersea tunnel was a fortress in and of itself, guarded as much by what he knew looked like blast-proof doors on the photos he'd seen online as it was by the tanks and soldiers on the outside of the complex that overlooked the town that had grown up around it. Before boarding his flight to Japan, he had done his research, and hew knew that for the most part the town served those that worked at his ultimate destination. There might be far more UN and JSSDF uniforms than was usual for the rest of the country and just about anywhere else in the world, but beyond that it looked like most Japanese towns, if somewhat more western influenced.

In the same letter that had summoned him here, he had been given a number to call, but his phone was still using an American SIM card. He checked it, and of course, no carrier. A glance at his father's old wristwatch told him that he was early, but he hated being at loose ends.

"Well, time to find a phone booth." he said to himself, and picked up the old dufflebag that held most of his material possessions. With the bag hanging over one of his slumped shoulders, he put on his headphones, put his phone's music player app on shuffle and went off to search for a technological relic. In spite of having spent the last four years with his uncle in Neo-Frisco, his Japanese hadn't really rusted, and he scanned over the Kanji characters on the various signs instead of using the English signage right next to them. Best get used to it again.

He wasn't surprised to find none of the six payphones that the station still had were occupied. He picked the one that seemed to be the least dingy and fished through his pockets for any Japanese change. Most of what he came up with was a few quarters and such he hadn't gotten rid off in the duty-free shop before getting on the plane, but he found a few five yen coins, should be enough to make a quick call. He was about to put the first coin into the slot but hesitated about halfway there. He had no idea who was on the other end, and the last thing he wanted to do right now was talk to his mother. Her disapproval of him had been the one constant in his life after his father had died, to the point where he had felt secretly relieved when she had had enough and sent him to live with his uncle in America. Yet another failure, yet another desperate attempt to make up for his mistakes? No, he didn't want that just yet. He knew that it had been his mother that had called him here, for all the letter had been signed by some random UNAD official. What she was doing at the facility, he had no idea, and normally he wouldn't have been all that eager to find out, but he knew better than considering disobeying a motherly command. The coin went into the slot. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't run away from this forever.

The number he dialled looked generic to him, and it took him longer to punch it in because he wasn't used to a physical keypad outside of his laptop. He waited for the person on the other end to pick up, fully aware that he was standing out horribly, not only because of the clothes he wore, but also because he was actually using one of these things.

Thankfully he didn't have to wait for very long, only four or five rings.

_"Katsuragi residence, if this is UNAD, I'm hanging up!"_

He was taken aback. "I… I'm sorry, but… I… I was told to call this number..." he trailed off, hating that he still kept stammering like this when things got awkward. "My name is Sinji, I-"

_"Oh damn! You weren't supposed to be here until twelve!"_

Oh great, he'd done it again. "I'm sorry..." he mumbled.

_"Don't be, kiddo. You just caught me by surprise. You're still at the train station?"_

"Uhm.. yeah, all the letter said that I was supposed to call that number..."

_"Oh, okay then. Wait somewhere where I can find you."_

"I… think I'll be out front."

_"I'll be there in ten minutes, see ya there, Shinji!"_

With that, she hung up ans Sinji was staring at a beeping telephone for a few seconds before slowly hanging up. He grinned while he did so, glad that this hadn't been his mother's private line or something. Headphones came back on, and as he walked out towards the exit, he heard the oh so familiar opening bars of one of his favourites. He quietly hummed at first, but by the time he had walked through the doors into the warm summer day, he was quietly singing to himself.

_"But life still goes on_  
_I can't get used to living without living without_  
_Living without you by my side_  
_I don't want to live alone hey_  
_God knows got to make it on my own_  
_So baby can't you see_  
_I've got to break free..."_

Yeah, he really missed that one thing he'd left behind in America.

And so he slipped away from a world that didn't want him to somewhere that he actually understood on a base level. As was usual when that happened, he almost jumped out of his skin when someone tapped him on his shoulder. Headphones were slipped down to his neck and he [I]did[/I] jump to his feet. In front of him stood a woman, hair dark purple and wearing the blue-black-and white camouflaged battledress of a Major in the UNAD forces, UN flag on one shoulder and the Japanese one on the other. The only things breaking the ensemble were the cross pendant hanging from her neck, as well as a warm, infectious smile.

His eyes darted downwards to her nametag for the briefest of moments.

"Shinji Ikuri?" she asked, and he nodded. "Major Misato Katsuragi. Your mother sent me to pick you up."

He had learned long ago not to show the turmoil he felt every time his mother was brought up without prior warning, but it seemed to have worked. They exchanged formal greetings.

"Is this everything you have?"

"I'm.. uh yeah, pretty much." he said apologetically, but Katsuragi waved that away.

"Eh, we'll go shopping if you need something. Come on, my car's over there."

Which turned out to be a small, somewhat sported out pre-Impact War Japanese hatchback from the mid 1980s, if Shinji's limited knowledge of vintage cars was anything to go by. He was disconcerted by the blatantly illegal way in which it was parked, half-way up the curb and the wrong direction down a one-way street. Even with the UNAD tags, this was something else. Once inside after his bag was stowed away in the trunk, Major Katsuragi turned the key and the engine came alive. After only a very curt "Seatbelts!", she rammed the car into reverse, and with squealing tires, the most terrifying ten minutes of Shinji's life so far began, and by the end of it, he wondered if the Major was even aware that such things like a speed limit existed.

"You look a lot like your picture, Shinji!" Katsuragi exclaimed as they left the city itself and headed towards the perimeter of the facility. The one she had spoken to was far too busy hanging on for dear life as the car went around a corner at a speed that was way too high and at an angle that the gods had not meant man to drive at.

"Y… yeah?" he managed eventually as the road became straight again.

"Your mother just described you as a scrawny, brown-haired kid likely wearing some snarky American T-Shirt. Wasn't much, so she gave me a picture from your file."

Sinji was too busy holding onto the Jesus handle over his head to feel more than sad acceptance that his mother hadn't really changed and didn't wonder why there was a file about him at… whatever place his mother worked at. The one maxim of his life at any point past pre-school had been that you did not ask what Gendo and Yui Ikari were doing for a living. When asked at school, Shinji had always said that they worked as administrators for the JSSDF and the UN, just as instructed, as much as he had wondered. The last time he'd wondered enough to ask out loud had been a few days after his father had died, and that had… not gone well. He had no desire for another tounge-lashing like that. A few months after that, she had decided that she'd had enough of him and had sent her ten year old son to live with his uncle in America.

At this point the Major slowed down as they began to approach the first checkpoint and traffic got dense enough to restrict her movement.

"She's going to be happy to see you, Shinji."

He doubted that, but made the noises and words that were expected of him, so he was fairly sure that Katsuragi didn't notice his doubting glance out the window.

"There's the first checkpoint. Keep your ID handy, Shinji."

All he had was his Japanese passport and his now entirely useless driver's licence, having received it a mere three weeks ago.

The first checkpoint was behind a bend, and the moment he handed over his passport and looked up, he forgot all about it. Behind the small gatehouse, he could see the flagpoles of maybe a dozen nations that participated in that particular UNAD branch lining the road as it lead towards… the biggest damn metal gates he'd ever seen, set into the side of an artificial hill. They had been impressive in the few press releases that came out of this place, but seeing something big enough for two of the old jumbo-jets to fit in comfortably with room to spare that at the same time was supposedly rated to withstand a nuclear weapon going off within less than a kilometre. At the moment the doors were open, each painted with half the UN flag and writing above that denoted it as UNAD Command NERV-1 in Japanese and English. The tunnel that gaped from within was half and half, both a four-lane highway and a double-track maglev train, fed from the immense multi-storey car park he knew to be mostly underground, alongside a special maglev rail that only UNAD members had access to. Right now, it wasn't exceptionally busy, but as he slowly pulled himself back together, he saw that there still was at least some traffic, but mostly deliveries of some kind.

It was then that he heard what the Major was talking about.

"- her son."

Great.

He wordlessly accepted his passport back and took great care to glance out of the window away from the friendly officer as she glanced at him with a worried frown. The small red car slowly moved through the parking lot, and Shinji sighed. She was worried about how he had reacted, but he was in no mood to face her judgement for his relationship with his mother. For how he had been happier living in the obscurity of the largest city in California than he had ever been during the annual visits, how he had considered running away when the letter had arrived, for how he had cried himself to sleep for days because he hadn't wanted to face her again?

Kautsuragi seemed to understand enough, and didn't really say anything, while Shinji, ever the polite child looked back at her.

"I'm sorry, Major, I…."

She grinned, infectious enough that he couldn't help smiling back at her, a little at least. "Families, eh?"

Shinji nodded, shy, but thankful that she had accepted him at least that much. His uncle and aunt, for all the love and acceptance they had given him, had never really understood, wanted to understand why he was so stiff with his mother, always wanting him to explain, while the Major seemed to be content with not knowing, for now at least. Not that it was his place to tell her anything, but he appreciated the gesture.

And then…. And then he was once again too busy staring out the window to worry about his issues or the absolutely insane speed at which Major Katsuragi was barrelling through the tunnel. All he could see were concrete walls, but it never seemed to end. The press releases had told him how long this tunnel was, hailed it as one of the great accomplishments of engineering in a post-Impact War world, but even if there were longer tunnels in Japan and elsewhere, the sheer scale of it beggared belief, and was something Shinji knew he had been unable to understand until seeing it himself. There was even a small, typically Japanese gas station halfway through, on the dot at kilometre fifteen.

It didn't stop at the other end when they finally emerged onto NERV-One itself, and once again, pictures didn't really tell the whole story or did the place any real justice. What had once been the Yokosuka peninsula thus named was covered in military installations. In it's middle stood the massive pyramid that dominated the entire landscape, with the rest of the gigantic base consisting of buildings, hangars and what not in the area around the pyramid, leaving maybe a two kilometre green belt between the buildings ancoast

"Wow, a _real _Geofront..."

Katsuragi grinned at his amazement. "Different from the old proposals, eh?"

Shinji couldn't do more but nod and stare at the beehive of activity around him, recalling the far smaller, purely residential proposals that had cropped up after the Impact War. UNAD kept a very tight lid on what they were doing at their various sites all over the world, but he knew that NERV-1 was the very centre of it all, and that his mother worked here.

Eventually though, he saw and heard something that would be burnt into his mind for the rest of his days.

The sound was an inhuman yell, conveying the sort of rage that Shinji had often heard described. He glanced over to Major Katsuragi, but decided against asking when he saw the very worried and also angry look on her face. The car bolted around the corner of some generic warehouse before she slammed on the brakes and the car came to a screeching halt.

Shinji didn't notice. In fact, he didn't notice anything but the gigantic, pale blue and vaguely humanoid machine that towered over the buildings around it. The only things breaking up the colour were the white accents on the shoulder pylons and arms, the grey facemask and the one piercing red eye. An eye that incidentally turned and looked directly at _him_. There was no way to tell with that sort of height difference, but somehow Shinji knew that this… thing was looking straight at him. He was too petrified to do anything but stand there and look back as the thing. Beside him, Katsuragi seemed to be furious too, but not with him. She reached over and pulled a small, digital walkie-talkie from the glove box. With sharp movements that betrayed her anger she set it to some frequency before yelling loude enough to make Shinji's ears ring.

"WHAT THE HELL, REI! STOP SCARING THE NEW GUY AND GET THE HELL BACK UNDER COVER!"

After a minute and another yelling a small, almost emotionless voice that a less scared Shinji would have almost described timid came from the small radio.

_"It was not my intent to scare him."_

"Well you did a damn good job at it anyway. Now get moving."

_"Hai, Major."_

Katsuragi turned to her young charge. "I have to apologize for that, Shinji."

"It's… fine..."

He didn't really know what he was saying at the moment, nor did he realise that he had been called 'the new guy'. He was too busy watching that massive beast retreat towards what had to be a giant lift of some sort, as two doors scraped aside and some sort of platform retracted with the beast on it.

"Yeah," the Major said, "normally we introduce people to what we do in a much more controlled way, but since [I]someone[/I] felt the need for unscheduled training… Shinji Ikari, meet Evangelion Unit 00 and it's pilot, whom I will personally have a bit of a talk with before we introduce you to her proper. Though I do have to wonder. Doing this without clearing it with me first is not the way she usually does things."

Shinji was still staring at the spot where the machine had disappeared.

"Yeah. It's not my job to explain all of this to you. That would be your mother's job."

The mention of her pulled him from his blurred state of mind. "Really?"

"Yeah, she's..." Katsuragi paused and tilted hear head towards him, looking curious. "Wait, you don't know?"

Shinji sighed, trying to decide how much he should and could tell this person he barely knew without causing offence on his first day here. "I spent the last six years with my uncle in America. I've been back to Japan what, four times?"

For a moment he was about to add that twice his mother had been too busy to come even see him, though he had to admit that she had called regularly, but eventually...

"I… see…" she said slowly. "Well, let's better get to it, don't we, Shinji."

Even though it was obvious that she wanted to break up the awkward tension suddenly hanging in the air between them, he mumbled a quiet apology and said nothing more for the rest of their drive through the base. He stared out of the window, resting his chin on his right arm, and only speaking when they went through yet another layer of security. Eventually, they pulled into a large parking lot in front of the pyramid and the Major led Shinji through the forest of parked vehicles and up a set of black marble steps towards the main entrance, a row of sliding doors at the base of the pyramid. He followed her without complaint, but as he looked around, he noted quickly that there just about as many scientists and technicians as there were soldiers, and that she let him straight past reception and towards the lifts. She selected one that had a numeric keypad next to the doors. After typing in a six digit code, the doors slid open. She walked in without a word, and Shinji followed. His eyes bulged a bit when he noticed that there were almost twice as many levels below them as there were above. The level she took them to was about halfway down, and was, as he dared to take a glance, labelled as 'Project E - Research and Development'.

Which up front turned out to look like 'Generic research facility #26' but that changed when as they walked deeper and deeper into the maze of individual labs, testing rooms, assembly shops and semi-automated component manufactures, as Shinji started to get a sense of the sheer scale of this place. He could not help but be impressed, even though he noticed fairly quickly that Major Katsuragi would gave gotten hopelessly lost without the guidance system of coloured stripes on the walls and floors, along with plenty of people to ask for directions.

Eventually she seemed satisfied that they had reached where they were going. "In here."

Which turned out to be a cavernous space, with four cradles, each designed to hold one of the massive machines, going by how three of them were occupied. The… Evangelions in them looked like something out of a Christian crucifixion scene.

He could see that they were connected to the building by a set of what he guessed were power cables or something, and technicians were climbing all over them with the same sense of urgency he'd noticed before, especially the third one, which was still missing parts of it's outer shell and both legs. At this distance he couldn't see the insides clearly, but it was obviously still being worked on.

Of the other cradles, one was holding the massive, pale-blue machine he'd seen earlier, the second one held another, of a slightly different design but just as disturbingly humanoid. It was coloured white, with black accents. Beyond that, the biggest difference he could see was some sort of horn sticking out it's forehead.

Katsuragi led him through a whole other maze of people, and Shinji followed her more or less on autopilot.

At least until he saw her respectfully greeting and then talking to a tall, brown-haired woman wearing a labcoat. Shinji froze in mid-stride and his insides twisted themselves into a knot tight enough that he felt physical pain and a primal urge to turn and run all the way back to his room overlooking the bay area. He knew the woman would be furious, but there was that small 'shoulder devil' that always told him to stand his ground. This time he chose to listen.

The woman turned around and looked at him, and it was all he could do not to shrink under her gaze.

"He… hello, Mother."

**tbc**

**1)It's a sign of the times that I have no idea what the average payphone call costs these days, since it's been six+ years since I last made one. And that's in Germany, never mind Japan. At the same time, writing in a verse where I can give the middle finger to certain aspects of physics, technology and High School level economics should be fun. :)**

**2) And yes, he just so happens to be a fellow follower of the same band I love. In case anyone wonders about the pattern the UNAD uses for uniforms and vehicles, here's a sample. Sue me, I'm a bit of a cold war nut and I like that pattern.**

**3) As for the Major's car, I decided to give her a ride appropriate for the way she drives. This picture is pretty much it, but of course with right-hand drive and souped up to near season 4 levels of performance. I like the combo between that colour and the rest of it.**

**4) Yes, the EVAs are getting an off-canon colour scheme, but it's always going to be something that's recognisable, related to the pilot, hence Rei's being pale blue instead of the darker shade from canon, Eva 01 having that white and black scheme from Shinji's canon plugsuit and so on. Along those lines. As for Eva 00's appearance, I simply never liked the look it had pre-refit. Too Metroid Prime for my taste.**

**5) Generally I've tried not to make changes for the sake of doing them but to only change things that either really bugged me, such as the kids being two years older than canon, or those that were simply logical extrapolations of other changes made. Shinji's mother being around is one thing I changed for a good reason that should become apparent in the next chapter, if you can't guess it already. To be honest, I'd pretty much forgotten what she looked like, so in my head I pictured her as a blonde for some reason before just going back and checking.**

**6) This chapter is as long as it is because I couldn't think of a good way to end it anywhere. I don't know exactly how many chapters this is going to have, since I usually end up adding/removing/moving stuff from my pre-outlined plot.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Alfa - Two**

Shinji didn't know how long he stood there in his mother's disapproving gaze, as if nailed to the floor. He desperately tried to make himself say something, anything really. But then, what was the point? He had never been able to do anything right since the death of his father, to the point that she had sent him to America, with no contact but an annual visit and a phone call on his birthday.

Now that he faced her again, all the resolutions and pacts he had made with himself for when he saw her again dissolved into thin air, and he was once more the worrying, crying ten year old who was sitting on a plane full of people he didn't know, heading towards a place he didn't know, to live with people he barely remembered from years earlier, all the while asking himself what he had done to make his mother, his only remaining parent, reject him.

"Shanji, you did receive the letter I had sent to you."

"Y—yes, mother."

He hated it when he stammered, but she just had that effect on him.

His mother didn't reply and instead dismissed Major Katsuragi to wait outside her office, before pulling an old, silver flip-phone from her pocket and quick-dialling a number and exchanging low, mumbled words with someone.

"Follow me, Shinji. The Commander wants to see you."

She marched off towards… somewhere. He knew better than to dare ask why her boss wanted to see him, so he followed her, not asking any questions even though he had a million of them and not offending anyone. So instead he studied his mother. Shinji noticed quickly that she seemed to be parting the seas because people respected her, giving her nods or short hellos, and they also seemed to be very curious about the scrawny teenager following their boss around. No one said anything, but they had to wonder.

He kept his head down though, knowing that he had no wish to have to face his mother any more than he had to, as much as he wanted to ask her why he was here to begin with, because if there was one thing his mother hated, it was pointless questions. Yet, he could help but glance ad all the things he could see. And there was plenty of that.

Much to his surprise, Shinji found his mother's office to be exactly the same way like it had been… before, zero personal flair and with every flat surface covered in blueprints, design sketches for whatever component she was working on or just about anything work related that could be printed on a sheet of paper while somehow she still managed to keep it from descending into total chaos. The far wall was dominated by a massive window looking out on the assembly area he'd seen earlier, with the only other feature being a potted Indian rubber tree under a UV lamp and a desk with a computer terminal on it. What surprised Shinji more was that the office was occupied, or at least there was someone in there that he did not know.

"Commander Fuyutsuki, may I introduce my son, Shinji Ikari?"

The Commander turned away from the window and mustered Shinji with an inquisitive look, who almost wilted under the sort of attention he'd always hated growing up, because normally that tended to mean he was about to get yelled at by a teacher, innocent or not. Much to his surprise, the Commander smiled, and Shinji allowed himself to return the look. Middle-aged and with grey hair, he looked to Shinji a lot like someone who could be friendly and nice if he wanted to, but was not to be messed with. Not that he intended to do so, intentionally at least. He wore the same light brown dress uniform Shinji'd seen all over the base.

"Mister Ikagi, I have heard many things about you."

Shinji blushed, but mumbled something that he couldn't have remember later even if he'd tried, but then he recalled who else was in the room with them.

"Y… yes?"

The Commander grinned at him and stepped aside has Shinji's mother walked past him to sit down in her chair. Shinji, still standing in front of the desk as if being called to the principal's office of his school, which was probably not that far away from the truth.

"Shinji..."

He looked up, and for one fleeting instant it looked as if mother had almost...[I]nice[/I], only for an instant. No, of course not. The last time she'd been like that had been his birthday, only a few days before his father had died.

"Yui, if I may?"

"Go ahead, Commander."

"Sit down, Shinji."

"Y… yes, of course."

He sat down in one of the utilitarian looking but surprisingly comfortable chairs on his side of the desk.

"Shinji," Fuyutsuki asked, "what do you know about the end of the Contact War?"

He knew what every other highschooler in California was taught.

"They… the Precursors, they deliberately triggered the San Andreas Fault in California, and used a kinetic penetrator weapon on Tokyo I when they realised they were loosing to the UN and then fought until they were all killed..."

The older man exchanged a look with his mother and then smiled for a second or two. "That is what you were taught, and for the most part even true. While we don't have time for a complete history less today, the short version is that after the UN forces in America wiped out what was left of their holdings there, they were too busy to pursue them across the ocean. At that time, the UN had also repulsed their last attack on the Japanese Free Zone and driven them out of the rest of the country. So they, as you learned in school, gathered what they had left and made a deathride on Tokyo."

"Second Impact." Shinji whispered. The apocalyptic final act of the war that had cost Japan it's capital city along with much of the pacific coastline. Tokyo 2, the city he'd flown into, lay ten kilometres further inland than the old one.

Fuyutsuki paused, and Mother spoke up. "Shinji, what we're about to tell you is as highly classified as anything, do you understand?"

He didn't reply for a moment, but eventually managed to bring himself to stammer a low "Y… yes." But apparently Mother hadn't heard him or was not pleased with his answer, because she slapped the surface of her desk with her flat hand. "Do. You. Understand?"

"I… I'm sorry, Mother. I.. Yes, I do."

"Good. Go on, Commander."

"Well, you know that during First Impact, the Precursors appeared out of thin air and proceeded try and conquer this planet. They smashed our militaries, they swept the skies and seas clean, until the UN employed three nuclear warheads from USS _Ohio_ against their central hub on Guam, closing The Rift and cutting them off from re-supply. What happened after that... Second Impact… it ended the war, but at an enormous cost and then only because we sacrificed old Tokyo. Let that sink in, Shinji. The UN was willing to sacrifice millions to keep the Precursors at bay."

Shinji desperately wanted to know what all this had to do with him.

"What is generally not known is that the Precursors didn't use their conventional forces, but rather something else entirely. We called them the First and Second Angels. The destruction of the node crystal under Tokyo was as much about stopping them as it was about preventing the Precursors from contacting their home."

The window behind the desk darkened and Shinji saw… creatures that clearly were not from this world. Two lumbering, humanoid figures were raised over whatever unfortunate soul had taken the picture. One of them looked like a featureless human that was out to eat your soul, but the other… It reminded him of nothing else but the two machines he had seen earlier.

Something had to have shown on his face, because Mother nodded when he looked up at her. He dared not saying anything, and when it was her that spoke next, he shuddered.

"Your father and I were working with UNAD, reverse-engineering whatever bits and pieces of Precursor technology we had access to, here, in this very facility, having started development on the Evangelions. We conducted an experiment during which I was… very nearly killed, but we did discover that the Precursors would indeed return. This is what we do here Shinji, and the reason why you are here now is that… we need you. You will pilot Evangelion Unit 01, and defend this installation against them."

Flat What.

It took him several minutes pull himself together enough to understand what he had just been told. They wanted [I]him[/I] of all people…

"But… ME?" was all he could manage to bring out coherently enough.

"Yes, you, Shinji." Mother said in that authoritative, 'there will be no further discussion' voice that he hated and feared in equal measure. Given what she wanted him to do, he was oh so very tempted to just throw everything back in her face, get up and leave. The thing was, he wasn't sure if she would allow him. Mother had made it clear that this was what he was to do, and as much as he wanted no part in any of this, he became quickly aware that he wasn't given any sort of choice.

He stared down at the floor, head resting in his hands and trying oh so hard not to yell, scream and cry all at the same time. Heaving as if he had just run a marathon. His insides really were twisted all over the place now, and if he'd had that big sushi for lunch, it would be on the floor now. Why would he of all people be entrusted with this sort of responsibility? He was under no illusion that it was because Mother believed he had any special ability or talent. For a short, tiny and foolishly hopeful moment, he'd even thought that Mother's voice had sounded sad at the prospect of sending her only son into battle, but when he looked up at her, it was the same hard, iron face he'd come to know. When it was directed at him, it was always time to bow to the inevitable. After some more time that could have been anywhere from five minutes to five hours, he looked up again for the first time. The two creatures were still on the display. Mother was still looking at him, demanding compliance, the Commander still had a face that said absolutely nothing. And he was still Shinji Ikari, scared out of his mind at the prospect of what he had been 'asked' to do. But also the same Shinji who hated disappointing people, especially when they asked for his help.

"I will do it, Mother."

Without a further word, Mother called in Major Katsuragi.

* * *

For Doctor Ritsuko Akagi the day had started just like any other, being as normal as they could be, working for NERV. That had changed when Major Katsuragi had called and told her that she was on the way down with the Third Child. She still vividly remembered Yui's reaction on hearing that her own son was the perfect pilot candidate, but that's what you got for insisting that certain critical systems be made the way they were. Ritsuko had to admit, it had been the quickest way to make it work, with the only other alternatives being even more ethically questionable than this whole damn mess was already. So instead of calling Yui to tell her 'I told you so', she had pulled the Third's plugsuit out of storage and prepared it for actual use. She doubted that they would have to do much in the way of adjustments if the data from his last medical in California was accurate, but as there were still plenty of Americans that had issues with properly adapting to the metric system, it was best to make sure.

"Doctor Akagi? The adjustments to the First Child's interface seem to be helping."

"Thank you, Lieutenant Ibuki." Ritsuko said and took the offered tablet and began to scroll through the data. "Going by this, we should not only be seeing a sync rate increase of several percent the next time she gets into the plug, but we may also be able to test if she can go through an emergency sync and de-sync without overloading her pain receptors this time. The chances that this causes permanent brain damage when she has to do it under combat conditions are just too high."

"Do you think it really is caused by her… special background?" Maya asked timidly. As the technician responsible for fitting and maintaining the interfaces pilot candidates used, she felt guilty for the near catatonic state Rei had entered when they had last trained her on emergency desync procedures. It hadn't helped that afterwards, Rei had simply disappeared after being discharged from the infirmary, not accepting Maya's profuse and heartfelt apologies or anyone else trying to comfort her. Ritsuko was a neurologist by trade, but had minored on psychology, but Rei had dismissed any attempts to help with a curt apology of her own.

"Very likely, Lieutenant. Though it isn't as if we could do much about that, now can we? I trust that you will do your best to work around that issue."

"Yes, senpai." Maya bowed quickly and then returned to her own station. Ritsuko looked after her, and wished her young and very capable assistant/tech was cleared know the entire reason why Rei was the way she was.

That train of thought was ended when she noticed Major Katsuragi walking into her lab, followed by what had to be the Third Child. Shinki Ikari had his shoulders slumped and seemed in equal parts desperately trying to please everyone around him and desperate to be anywhere but here. It fitted with the psych evaluation done surreptitiously by NERV when his being a pilot candidate had first been floated. Going by said same evaluation, he the face with which he looked back at her was the way it was because he was likely more scared of failure in the eyes of those around him, especially a certain director of Project E who really should..

Ritsuko shook her head. It was not her place to question Yui's relationship with her son, or the lack of same. Besides, it wasn't like Shinji had the least inkling of a choice in all this. The UNAD needed him in an Entry Plug, and that was where he would go.

"So, you are Shinji Ikari, the Third Child?"

He bowed and mumbled something that could charitably called a "Yes, Ma'am." and handed his bag to Katsuragi who patted him on the shoulder and told him that she would be waiting outside.

"Come on then, sit down over there."

With that, she motioned for him to sit down on the examination chair. Shinji did so, if very hesitantly. Ritsuko connected the same tablet that had Rei's data on it to the chair.

"Arms on the armrests please, back of your hands up, and lean back as far as you can."

Shinji grabbed the front end of the armrests and leaned back as instructed. Almost immediately, the sensors started measuring everything from his body temperature to his galvanic skin response, though aside from confirming that he was indeed keeping himself somewhat in shape, like the reports suggested. After about twenty minutes, she had all the data she needed, and there seemed to be no unknowns that might prevent him from piloting an Evangelion. No heart defects, no undiagnosed respiratory conditions as far as she could tell. One hurdle taken, only about a million more to go.

"Right, have you been told how this works?"

Shinji scratched the back of his head. "I'm… sorry, but no."

"No need to apologise, Shinji." Ritsujo said with a smile that was meant to be encouraging. "So what do you know then?"

To her surprise, Shinji spoke up. "So, Major Katsuragi said something about a brain scan?"

She couldn't help herself, she laughed. "It's a bit more involved than that, but she certainly has the basics down right, as is befitting for our Chief of Operations."

Shinji didn't reply, but nodded.

"Now," Ritsuko continued, "what we need to do the final calibration of your interface is a complete neurological profile, and-"

"Mine is on file from when I was in hospital for a suspected concussion."

She wasn't sure what surprised her more, that a boy who some had described as a doormat interrupted her like that, or the bitterness that he displayed. She sighed. 'Gods above, Yui, what did you do to to your son?'

The thought was fleeting, and something to ponder over later. Right now….

"Well, it would have been done anyway, you did have a suspected concussion."

"For almost seven hours?"

Ritsuko was taken aback, that moment Shinji looked and sounded so much like a younger version of his father, including his favourite thinking pose, it genuinely creeped her out. The moment didn't last long, because Shinji quickly became aware of what he'd said, and whom he'd said it to.

"Oh my… I..I'm so sorry, Doctor. I had no idea-"

She waved him away. "It's fine, Shinji. However, at your age, the brain undergoes the usual changes and developments, and for a number of reasons, first and foremost your continued health and our investment into Eva-01, we do have to run some tests to ensure that we are still in the normal performance parameters. Now, shall we get started?"

They watched the surveillance feed in silence, with the low hum of the air conditioning and the facility's power supply being the only sound in the room. Yui and Fuyutsuki watched as Shinji was put through a battery of tests that were more stringent than those required for the space programme.

The Commander glanced over at Yui Ikari, who was staring at the feed of her son getting probed and prodded with an emotionless stare. After more than a decade of working with her, he knew Yui well, well enough in fact to be able to tell what part of her outward demeanour was a farce, and why she kept up the act. It was also why he dared saying what he said next.

"You know that he'll be absolutely furious when he finds out that we've kept the truth from him, Yui."

Said scientist said nothing at first and instead kept watching as Shinji's head was measured for the interface cap that would go inside his neurohelmet.

"That can't be helped, Kozo. We need him piloting Eva-01, not distracted with all this."

It was what she said, but Fuyutsuki was certain, no, knew that there was much more to it than the circumstances surrounding the death of Gendo Ikari, or why Shinji had been sent to America.

"You are the head of Project E. I will not undermine your authority, Yui. Pilot health in body and mind is your area of responsibility But, remember that in the end, you might not have a choice, and with something like this it _will_ affect his mental state either way and therefore his ability to pilot an Evangelion and, if need be, to fight. Which will impact the functioning of this command, which _is_ my ultimate responsibility."

On the screen, Shinji laughed shyly at some sort of joke Major Katsuragi had made, standing in the background and quietly observing for the rest of the time. If someone had told him of the way his mother looked at the screen when she saw this, he would have instantly declared them insane.

"Don't forget that in the end, he is your son."

* * *

Shinji was doing his best to keep his breathing calm and even, as he'd been told to do. His plugsuit, a skintight contraption that was as bulky as a space suit until you sealed it up and in contracted, was uncomfortable, and he really doubted that he would ever get used to it. The helmet made it even worse, but it at least was made out of material lightweight enough that he wouldn't have felt it but for the various feeds and the HUD that was projected onto the visor.

The inside of the Entry Plug was lit with the harsh light an array of blue LEDs produced, so he raised his right hand in front of his face and turned it around, mustering the hexagonal material that made up the suit in it's contracted state. Should he be be glad or angry that Mother had cared enough to keep his profile up to date so that the suit fit him without much of any adjustments? In the end, it was a massive responsibility she expected him to shoulder, and as much as the idea of maybe going into _combat_ scared him, facing Mother's disappointment was not something that he was looking forward to. At all.

And what was more, a small part of him, in the back of his head that was still a ten year old boy relished the chance to pilot a giant, stompy robot. He suppressed a yawn, not wanting to show the people on the other side of his radio how tired he was: Something must have leaked through though, because he could hear Major Katsuragi chuckle over the same connection. _"Don't worry, Shinji. This is just a short connection and synch test with the Evangelion. After that, we're done for the day."_

"Thank you, Major."

_"Shinji, stand by for LCL deployment."_

"Yes, Mother."

She didn't need to say anything. He knew he'd disappointed her again.

_"Remember to breathe normally. The LCL is there to keep you from passing out if the G-Forces get too strong and from getting knocked around too much if your Evangelion starts taking blows. It is oxygenated and can be summed up as liquid super air, boosting your reaction times as long as you're immersed in it and connected to the Evangelion's systems."_

"I know, Mother." After all, he'd been told this four times in the last hour.

The umbilical connection that went from his suit to the internal systems of the plug didn't really restrict his movements any more than the couch itself and he'd been told that the itch from the neural cap would go away eventually, but he had to fight the urge to take it off and scratch anyway. He looked down at his feet, and slowly but surely the cylindrical plug was filling up with an amber-coloured liquid that, upon first examination, didn't restrict his movements as much as water did, but he wasn't expected to breathe that in. He swallowed when the warm cold liquid reached the edge of his suit and made contact with his skin. He began to outright panic when his head began to be submerged.

'Don't panic!Don't panic!Don't panic!Don't panic!Don't panic!Don't panic!Don't panic!'

Hearing the voice of his mother in the back of his head when he was about to panic was one of those things he needed the least right now, but when he could hold his breath no longer it felt like he was in a room that hadn't been aired in a week, but smelt like... vanilla. Strange, and he would never really get used to it, but Shinji had to admit, he could breathe normally.

_"LCL deployment complete, vital signs have normalised. Beginning insertion procedure."_

He could feel the Plug being lowered from it's current position into the Evangelion and set into it's position with a 'cathunk'.

_"Plug inserted, beginning hookup."_

There was little for him to do.

_"Shinji,"_ Mother said over his radio, in a voice that… seemed to be almost concerned, strangely enough, _"this is the first time that we've inserted the Unit-01 Plug with an actual pilot instead of a testing dummy, so it will take us some time to run all the systems tests. After that, we can start to sync the control systems to your neural patterns."_

Which, according to Doctor Akagi, would be a long, arduous and painful process, but if his potential as the Third Child was high enough, would eventually turn the Evangelion into an extension of his own body, with all the advantages and problems. Shinji was under no illusion that he was talented enough to reach that level, but everyone insisted it was possible, and who was he to contradict all those people? So instead of complaining, he spent the next thirty minutes sitting there without saying a word, getting used to his new world.

_"Systems test complete, everything green across the board. Beginning neural sync procedure."_

Without having to be told, he leant back in his couch, trying to empty his mind. For the longest time he felt nothing at all and began to wonder if everything was going right. Just when he was about to ask if it was, the pain began. From one second to the next, it felt as every single nerve in his body was on fire, and Shinji wanted to scream loud enough to be heard on the surface. At least until he began to feel as if someone had stabbed him in the back of the neck and tried to pull his brain out through the opening.

All this lasted for ten more minutes that were pure agony. Eventually, the pain lessened to merely the level of a very severe headache.

_"Your initial sync is complete. Vitals have stabilised, and the next time it will be a lot less painful."_

He knew this was as close as he was going to get to any form of apology from his mother, so he took it for what it was. "I..." he groaned at the pulsing pain in his head. "I think I'm going to be fine."

_"Akagi here. Your sync rate… is impressive to say the least. Eleven percent right off the bat. You're doing good."_

"I-"

Every alarm on the base went off at once.

**tbc**

**1) For some reason I pictured Yui with a flip-phone when coming up with that scene, so that's what she uses.**  
**2) Expect at least some adaptation decay, so characters will be somewhat OOC in terms of whatever canon of the show you follow. For the record, this is based on the original NGE, which should be fairly obvious when a certain someone starts to show up.**  
**3) With all due apologies to Dr. Akagi. I'm aware that this would be a demotion, but at the same time my sympathies are limited. I needed a job for Yui to do at NERV-1, and given her canon involvement with GEHIRN and NERV, it made sense to make her head of Project E, given that Gendo isn't available. She's a character I'm genuinely not sure about to begin with, so that doesn't help.**  
**4) I'm also trying to go for a somewhat more professional military bent with all this, with things**  
**5) The pacing is less than ideal here.**  
**6) In terms of raw combat power, the various Angels, EVAs and weapons thereof are roughly the same as canon. Adjustments have been made due to the AUness of this version of the setting, but nothing that's gamebreaking for either side.**


	3. Chapter 3

**This is based on the original, but I may borrow weapons from Rebuild and what have you. I will end up inventing my own if the situation requires, but if I do that (and that's a very big if) you won't see any lightsabres or other deus ex machina of that sort. What you see here is merely an additional variant of an existing, canon weapons system that has an IRL precedent for the basic concept.**

**Chapter Alfa-Three**

She had to have beaten some kind of record getting from the Evangelion cradles to the command centre, but by the time she got there, the rest of the day shift were already at their stations, and the Master Display in the middle of the room showing Tokyo Bay at this moment, with a half-ring of consoles opposite from the door, tiered and slightly skewed to the side so that the operators could see the display.

"Talk to me, people!" Misato yelled out when seeing that the Commander wasn't there yet.

"Major Katsuragi, our satellite network is showing activity near the Yokohama rift."

She looked at the display. Like everything in and around Tokyo Bay, Yokohama had been destroyed by Second Impact, but unlike Tokyo 2, which was now located on the new coastline some ten miles further north than the old city, Yokosuka and Yokohama had disappeared from the maps. What had been left of the former had been rebuilt into NERV-1, but the latter was still a collection of abandoned ruins. While that reduced the chance of significant collateral damage, it was also the rift closest to the fortress wall. The rifts were the reason why the only physical access to NERV 1 was on the opposite side and thus so out of the way. If there really was an Angel coming out of one of them, then Rei and Eva-00 would be in for a fight. The doors hissed open again, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see the Commander come in.

"What sort of activity, Aoba?"

"The particle readings are higher than anything we've ever measured, Ma'am. Way beyond the usual fluctuations. Consistent with records of rift manifestations."

Fuyutsuki took his seat. "Status of Eva-00?" he asked.

"Armed, charged and ready. The First Child is ready for deployment, the magnetic catapults are ready."

"Let's hope she can do this on her own, whatever is really happening. Eva-01 is nowhere near combat ready."

Much as she agreed with the Commander, Misato was a trained, experienced combat soldier, which was why she had operational field command and not him, and why she feared that they might not have a choice.

"I'd like to have him prepped anyway, Commander. Arm him with a Pallet Rifle, it was designed to be used with little too no training."

Which merely meant that as a high-velocity railgun rifle, it was about as point-and-shoot as you could get with a ballistic weapon, not that an untrained civilian like Shinji would be able to hit anything with it. Hell, he was just as likely to hit Rei and Eva-00 instead of any sort of enemy. But then, the only other even remotely operational Evangelion on the planet was currently still inside NERV-2, at Munster and half a planet away. So instead of cursing politics, she turned to the Commander, who seemed to be worried and unhappy about the idea, just as much as she was herself. Yet he nodded, and Aoba sent the order.

"Where the hell is Lieutenant Hyuga?"

"It's his day off, Ma'am, but I already called him."

"That won't do us any good, there's no chance he'll make it here before both ends of the tunnel are sealed." Misato was oh so tempted to turn the air blue after she said this, but that wouldn't do anything either, and she was, in the end, a professional. Well, another beer for dinner tonight.

"Particle readings are going off the scale, we have definite rift activity!"

"We need more information. Put the feed from Keyhole Eleven on the secondary display. AND SOMEONE check if the JSSDF has already been alerted." Not that tanks and guns would do any good in this almost Kaiju-movie she seemed to be living in.

"JSSDF has been alerted, Major." Aoba replied, "And our own defensive systems have been powered up."

For a few minutes that felt hellishly long, Misato could do nothing but wait. On one side of the main display, the rift, no longer confined to particle sniffers and the infrared spectrum and now visible to the naked eye, was a menacing, amber presence, in the middle was a standard electronic map that showed her that JSSDF units were moving into position, while on the right, an emotionless Rei and an openly scared Shinji were waiting for whatever might happen next.

Aoba broke the moment when he slightly readjusted the feed. Misato would never be able too remember what he said at that moment, because she was already looking at the display when… something came through. She would not want too describe that thing as any sort of humanoid shape, but it was bi-pedal and had two arms hanging down from it's shoulders an open ribcage openly showing what had to be it's core, the same amber colour as the rift. As much as she wanted to be, Misato refused to feel unnerved by that thing. She felt as if she should say something profound or meaningful for the history books, but instead looked towards the Commander who silently nodded in response. So instead she re-adjusted her cap and spoke with an authoritative voice.

"Issue the Invasion Alarm for the entire Prefecture. Deploy Eva-00."

Elsewhere in the base, the light blue Evangelion was strapped into the cradle of the magnetic catapult that would fire it into one of six deployment tunnels towards the expected battle areas beyond the wall. Unlike most, including Major Katsuragi, also the full truth why it was that way. So when the cradle was fired down the tunnel, it's outer surface lit by the ligts inside the tunnel and the faint blue glow of the magnetic actuators, Eva-00 gripped the automatic pallet rifle tighter than than usual, the only sign that anything was unusual. Near the end of the tunnel the cradle slowed down and was locked into the lift that would bring it back to the surface. As the platform covered the distance, Rei ran a last check on her rifle.

_"Remember, Rei, you have enough of a battery charge for five minutes at combat power, so use the umbilical system as much as you can. Ammunition and charging stations are everywhere in the battle area and the locations have been loaded into your navigation systems."_

"Yes, Major."

Rei knew all this. In fact, it had been her that had tested those very systems during construction. But where just about every other teenager on earth would have been annoyed at being told all this every time she deployed, but Rei was not a normal teenager, even beyond her red eyes. So she didn't add anything or complain.

Over her head the exit hatch opened, letting natural, late afternoon light into the tunnel. Soon enough, Eva-00 was exposed to the world again and as the hatch closed behind her, Rei was already aiming down the sights, scanning the horizon for the Angel. She didn't have to wait for very long, because soon enough, the being became visible, meandering around a hill and towering over the ruins of what had been Yokosuka before the Impact War. Rei contemplated opening fire, but even though the Angel was within effective range of her rifle, her position wasn't the best, but the cradle also had enough cable in it so that she would be able to move around some before she had to lengthen it or plug into another power station entirely.

"Target acquired. The Angel is moving straight towards Final Dogma, and I am positioning myself to intercept."

_"Be careful out there, Rei. I don't want to have to train another pilot for Eva-00."_

"Yes, Major."

The Angel was large, larger than her own Evangelion by a considerable margin, but to Rei the matter was that if the information she and her fellow pilot had been given was accurate, then the Angel's AT field would be stronger than hers several times over. Limited as it was by human technology, her Evangelion weaker in every respect. Human knowledge of Precursor technology was limited, opportunities to study intact examples during and after the Impact war had been very scarce. So Rei would, have to make things up as she went, not something she was used to or very good at.

Pushing her fears aside every time her plug was lowered into place was difficult and a struggle that Rei hated utterly, but that she still faced. She had expected to feel similar when she actually had to fight an Angel, had expected to fear her own death more than anything else, but she did not. It confused her, and she hated being confused.

However, everything but the task at hand disappeared from her head as the Angel stared in her direction. Given it's lanky anatomy, Rei had no way to tell, but she knew for certain that it was looking directly at her. That was reinforced when the Angel established an AT field around itself. The amber hexagons looked like they always did in the simulators and in the footage she'd seen, but the energy readings that the Evangelion displayed on the HUD in her helmet visor were interesting, to say the least.

"Control, I have been spotted. Preparing to engage."

The Major's next message was hardly surprising in the light of those readings. [I]"Holy… Rei, if those readings are accurate, then the Angel's AT field is almost five times as strong as yours. Do your best, Rei, and open fire as soon as you're ready. Eva-01 is on the cradle and under final prep, and the pilot is still very new."[/I]

It was obvious even to Rei that Major Katsuragi was not looking forward to the idea of sending out Eva-01 and it's unknown, untrained pilot. She would if she had to though.

Taking it for what it was, Rei checked her aim and opened fire.

Like any other pallet rifle, the one in her hand was a coil gun that fired depleted advanced uranium penetrators that had been developed from fairly successful new ammunition types used by UNAD tanks in the later days of the Impact war. The rifle and it's ammunition had been forged with great expense and care over years and years, representing the latest and greatest in at least theoretically portable weaponry.

And achieved almost nothing.

The first thee-round burst impacted on the Angel's AT field and did so little damage that the fluctuation in field strength barely registered on the sensors reporting back to Final Dogma.

Rei had switched position as soon as she had fired. That turned out to be a good thing, because the Angel extended two blood-red lances from it's forearms and pulverized the ruins that had once served her as cover with no more effort than what one used to swat a fly.

In the meantime, Eva-00 was once more in a cover position and Rei fired again. A total of nine rounds impacted on the AT-field with so little effect that had Rei been prone to swearing or any other emotional outbursts, the transmissions would have had to be censored. As it was, she only reported that the ammunition was still ineffective and that the magazine had been expended, even as she shifted position.

In the command room, Doctor Ikari had joined them and run the numbers. Upon being told that at this rate, Rei would have to expend something like six-hundred rounds of ammunition before the AT-field was eroded awway, Major Katsuragi showed how much of a professional she was by not swearing enough to make the world's most experienced sailor blush. Instead she reviewed her options before selecting the least bad one.

So it was that an utterly terrified Shinji found himself fired down a catapult derived from technology originally developed for aircraft carriers, clutching a rifle that fired shells larger than his head even though he'd never fired a weapon before except once on a shooting range, and piloting a giant stompy robot at the same time.

Already up on the surface, Rei knew that it would still be at least two minutes until Eva-01 was there to assist, and she couldn't retreat much further before the Angel could stomp on the cradle to which was still connected. If that happened, the tunnel would be collapsed with explosives, but the consequences of that scarcely bore thinking about. She didn't know the pilot, but he was her comrade in arms. The rifle in Eva-00's hands barked again and again, slowly chipping way at the Angel's AT field, as much to keep it from regenerating it's fields and focused away from the lift as anything else.

Eventually, she heard a new voice on the channel.

_"OUCH! THIS HURTS!"_

Eva-01 had fallen flat on it's face.

To give credit to the pilot, getting used to the minute input lag that came with low sync rates had taken her considerable time, and she hadn't had to do it while under fire. She watched Eva-01 out of the corner of her eye even as she continued to engage the Angel. When the unknown pilot actually managed to somehow clamber back to his feet, she was genuinely impressed. Whoever he was, he had an innate talent for piloting an Evangelion. His movements were jerky and unnatural still, but he was clearly in control. His potential was great, greater in fact than anyone else she had been close to in months.

_"Rei, meet Shinji. Shinji, Rei. Now that introductions are done with, we put a little something extra on the cradle for you, Rei. Shinji, it falls to you to keep the Angel busy while Rei does what she has to. Eva-00, switch to channel 12."_

* * *

And so Shinji found himself to be alone again, cursing himself for having failed so spectacularly when taking the first step off the platform. Being told that he would feel what the Evangelion did and actually experiencing it were two entirely different things.

He saw the Angel for the first time. And he was scared stiff at the sight of it. He feared death to the point that it had taken him falling flat on his face to snap out of it. He was certain that in Final Dogma they had thought this to be funny. Now he was sitting in a pilot's couch of this thing they had shoved him into and was expected to help fight something out of a monster movie, sent by the same beings that had once vowed to destroy humanity for just being there.

"I must not run away. I must not run away. I must not run away."

The Angel was advancing towards him, and it took Shinji every ounce of willpower not to run away.

_"I'd rather you open fire, Shinji."_

"Yes, Mother." he replied while blushing furiously. He was oh so very glad that the Evangelion's systems compensated for at least some of his screw-ups, because he knew that his hands were shaking.

The other Evangelion had disappeared somewhere among the ruins while he hadn't been paying attention, and so the Angel defaulted to the only target it could see. Him.

Shinji managed to evade that first blow more out of instinct than anything else, he was too busy with his fight-or-flight response to consciously do anything else. The lance missed him by mere metres, close enough that the Evangelion's external systems picked up the low hum and crackle of the AT field that surrounded it. It pulverized what was left of a pagoda behind him instead. He kept moving, narrowly avoiding a number of follow on blows as he did what he had said he mustn't do, run away. Somehow he managed to do it without falling over again.

Until one of the indicators on his HUD told him that he couldn't move any farther away without connecting his cable to another source. His hands shook even more as he slowly turned Eva-01 around and faced imminent and certain death. He could barely hear Major Katsuragi telling him to shoot. The muzzle of his rifle aimed itself towards the Angel as if on autopilot. Shinji would never remember why, but it was in this moment that he remembered something that his uncle had told him years ago, calling it 'The Astronaut's Prayer'.

"Dear Lord, don't let me fuck up."

Somehow his hands managed to give the Evangelion the commands it needed to pull the trigger. Luckily for Shinji, the default setting the rifles were issued with was the three-round burst that Rei had first employed during the fight, so one of the rounds actually hit the Angel's AT field. While it wasn't enough to do more than superficial damage, it did cause the Angel to stop. If it was because it was surprised that the fleeing Eva-01 had turned around to actually fight or him sensing that Shinji could run no further didn't really matter, because it readied itself for yet another strike.

It was then that he noticed that he had been tuning out Major Katsuragi the entire time, and that she was yelling at him to take cover. He looked around, taking in his surroundings for the first time since stepping off the elevator. He was near what had once been a public park, now utterly overgrown. On the other side of the relatively open space, the ruins of a shopping centre would provide him just about enough cover, so he started to run over there, blindly firing his rifle. Later analysis would show that he had actually landed several more hits like this. The rifle clicked empty, and Shinji made the mistake to try and look back at the Angel. Because he lost concentration, Eva-01 fell down again.

The Angel was about two kilometres away at the time, having moved slower than Eva-01. Shinji hoped that between the distance and the trees at least slightly covering him, he could reach the ruin he wanted to take cover behind. He could hear that Eva-00 was taking shots at the Angel from somewhere, and this distraction allowed him to crawl Eva-01 into cover. Somehow he had managed to hold onto his rifle, useless as it was now with an empty magazine.

_"Shinji, can you hear me? Rei is about to fire, and we need you behind cover!"_

"I- I'm takin cover behind a building, Major, away from the Angel."

_"Good. Hold onto your hat."_

What on earth would need him to-

His answer came in the for of not one, but three absolutely gigantic explosions. His radio dissolved into harsh static for several minutes even as consecutive shockwaves of heat and wind passed over him and the remnants of the building he was hiding behind. Had they- a check revealed that there was no radiation or anything. He chanced a look around a corner, and much to his horror, the Angel was still standing, but- was that [I]smoke[/I] coming from it's back?

Something moved at the edge of his field of vision.

Eva-00 was moving so fast that the Angel, wounded and charred as it was, _tried_ to move away from the circle of fresh destruction around it, but had barely started to turn when the knife-wielding Eva-00 made contact. They slammed into one another and the Angel attempted to wrap itself around it's assailant, but the other pilot was having none of it and elbowed the Angel in the head, shattering the already cracked mask and revealing the horrifying face underneath. The Angel then lost it's balance, falling on it's back and dragging Eva-00 down as well. This was when he lost sight of them for a moment, until the other Evangelion raised it's upper body, kneeling on top of the Angel and bringing it's knife down on it. And again. Again, again, again, splattering it in the Angel's purple-blueish blood.

Shinji just stared at the scene before him and watched with equal parts of horror and admiration, feeling slightly envious of the other pilot.

Was this what Mother wanted him to be like?

**tbc**

**1) Five minutes of charge/One minute at full power on the internal battery is one of my bigger gripes with the setting. It's nowhere near enough for any sort of realistic combat ops. Yes, it's an anime, and Gendo may have engineered this stupid limitation to keep the Evangelion's power levels down, but if they'd at least been consistent in applying that rule, I'd complain a lot less. I took the liberty to slightly re-write that rule, but I don't think that it's gamebreaking.**

**2) Writing Rei is surprisingly difficult. Too much, and she comes across as an emotionless robot, which she clearly isn't in the show, much less here, not enough and it isn't recognisably Rei any more. I admit, her background in this version of the verse makes it easier, but making her believable in the way I want her to be is still rather difficult.**

**2.5) Adopted some minor changes in the way I do things, including one in how I translate some things into written text.**

**3) Looking back at it now, and given how versatile N2 tech seems to have been, I cannot help but wonder why they never went for any sort of Evangelion-portable launch system before Evangelion 2.0. I mean yeah, the OTL Davy Crockett launcher had such short range that the crew would have been fried by their own nuke, but an Evangelion-sized rocket should be possible. While the individual rockets would be of a smaller yield than the N2 mine used on the 3rd Angel in the show, they'd still be the equivalent of a small nuke each, and the 3rd Angel was one of the weaker ones in canon. The smaller yield is the reason why Shinji isn't fried along with the Angel.**

**4) I think it's fairly obvious now that this Shinji isn't quite the canon one. Obviously, with his mum being somewhat around and not quite the douchenozzle that was canon Gendo, as well as having been raised by someone who actually cared about him and made the effort to let him know that, Shinji is bound to be a more healthy and stable person. Still has a host of issues of course, but he's a lot less of a doormat. Should be interesting once Asuka enters the picture.**


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Alfa-Four**

The Entry Plug was lowered into it's maintenance bay and the LCL was drained within less than thirty seconds. Shinji didn't care what happened to it after that, he was too busy puking over the side as soon as the hatch was open. Once the last of his airline food had transferred from his stomach to the metal floor, he looked up and was greeted by the smiling face of one of the technicians he'd seen earlier. Going by the flag on his UN uniform, he was American, so it didn't surprise Shinji when his Japanese was accented.

"Don't worry, kid. Happens to everyone the first time they go into combat." He handed Shinji a piece of cloth, which was used to wipe the bile off his mouth once he had stopped emptying his innards.

He knew the man was trying to be reassuring, but that didn't exactly help in that moment. What did was the rush of medics that flooded the room, the fact that Major Katsuragi was leaning on the doorframe, giving him a reassuring smile and a not. Still, he appreciated the sentiment, so a croaking "Thank you." was the least he could do.

"Don't you worry, kid. At least the Stormtrooper got to see some action, thanks to you."

Shinji was distracted by yet another barrage of medical tests run on him, but eventually he remembered that his uncle was into old American Sci-Fi and had made him watch those movies more than once. He recalled paintjob on EVA-01, and admittedly, the comparison wasn't the worst. "Stormtrooper… heh."

Weak smile following, and another nod from the American. "Don't worry, we'll get her back into shape."

He didn't really worry about that, he was too busy holding onto his inner organs, but but he sensed that it was best to keep the people doing his repairs on his side. Not that he wanted to fight those things, but he knew that it wasn't really up to him. Mother would be furious if he ran, and if he did anyway and someone was killed because he wasn't there… He would hate himself even more. Life sucked, but that was what it was. He half walked, was half pulled to the entire level of the underground parts of the base that served as the best equipped hospital in Japan, as he would later learn. At the moment, he failed to notice anything more, having fainted almost the moment he was moved from the stretcher to a bed.

Had he been awake, he would have seen his mother quietly standing in a corner of the room, studying his chart regularly glancing at his still form between lines, and wishing that Akagi allowed tablets to be used instead of hardcopy printouts.

The third person in the room was Doctor Akagi, holding a copy of the same chart. "His vitals are in the normal range. Slightly elevated heart rate and pulse, but again, normal response for someone in combat for the first time."

Yui was about to voice a complaint, but Akagi raised her right hand to hold her back. "He fainted because he hasn't eaten anything since this morning and was put through a high-stress combat environment and needed his body to adapt to LCL exposure! So of course his system slips into safemode! You'd be using up all your energy reserves too!"

"So what's your prescription? Take him to the next Yoshinoya restaurant?"

"Would be convenient, as they do have one on base."

No response, but Ritsuko didn't really expect one. Instead she checked something else. "Eh, it's nothing a few good meals and a day of rest can't cure. He'll need that before I can allow him into a live plug again."

Yui was visibly unhappy, but knew better than to override her. Ritsuko was not only the sole person who knew the interface technology better than herself, but was also running the Medical Department for Project E, and was only too aware of this.

"Look at it this way, he has an amazing talent for EVA piloting. His base sync rate is out of this world."

She paused, realizing what she'd just said. "Sorry, poor choice of words."

"Are you certain?" Yui replied, dismissing it with a wave of her hand.

Ritsuko nodded. "Completely. Not particularly surprising, but for someone without any formal training, it's very impressive."

Again, no answer, again, not surprising. She was not going get into it with her old friend over her son, not today.

With a pained sigh, Yui bowed to the inevitable and nodded. "Let us hope then that there isn't another Angel attack in the next few days. The school year doesn't start for another three weeks, so we have until then to get him up to speed."

Yui looked at her, and Ritsuko hoped she wasn't doing her impression of a ripe tomato. "His accommodations have been sorted out, and Major Katsuragi will take care of the details. Does that meet with your approval?"

A meek nod.

"Good."

Without any further word, Yui turned on her feet and stomped out of the room, her phone already out.

Ritsuko turned to the sleeping teenager and whispered, knowing that he was unable to hear: "Too bad we can't choose our parents, isn't it?"

She checked the readouts on the monitor over his head and decided that it would be best to let him sleep for another hour or so, until Major Katsuragi's shift ended. Did he deserve any of this? No, no one did. Nor did they and him have much of a choice, abd as much as she hated it, she knew she wwould end up having to patch these kids back together again and again, just so that they could do the same thing tomorrow.

Like just about everyone in NERV-1, she was too young to have served in the Impact War, but it was a part of the job that her father had talked about the few times he'd opened up about that time. With a sigh, she walked out of the room. Such was life.

* * *

Elsewhere in the base, and so late that it was early again, Misato was staring at the far wall of her office, but not looking at anything in particular. As Operations Officer, it wasn't really her job, but she was still annoyed at the meeting she'd just had with the Commander. Transporting an Evangelion was not the easiest task, yes, but it frustrated her to no end that there was no way to transport an Evangelion by rail in anything but a disassembled state, which was not going to happen even if the Russians had rebuilt the Trans-Siberian Railway to be capable of taking this sort of load, there were places where they would have to bore new tunnels or blast away half a mountain before it was possible. That left sea transport. Theoretically, three routes were possible, on through Suez, one around South Africa and one through the Panama Canal. Once again, the sheer size of the package and the impossibility to disassemble it for transport limited options, though this time in what ship was being used. There were only so many oil tankers left, and no one would want to run one at a loss away from the usual routes between the Middle East and the rest of the world, so the only remaining option would be an aircraft carrier. Which, in turn, meant meant involving the national militaries of a fairly small selection of foreign powers as the JSMSDF's Hyugas were too small. Going through the UN was easy on paper, but the Commander wouldn't be happy if NERV owed, say, the Americans or the British a favour for the use of one of their nuclear-powered units. The politics of all this were not something she would like to deal with.

Of course the shortest route would be through Suez, still taking around twenty-three days, assuming an average speed of twenty knots for the task force. Misato sighed, and leaned back in her chair. Her eyes landed on one of the few family pictures she had. "Guess all those extra maths classes you made me take are paying off now, aren't they, Dad?" A sad smile she never let anyone see played over her face, but the moment disappeared when her phone buzzed, reminding her that her shift ended soon, and she had someone to pick up afterwards.

She silently cursed at the idiot who had decided that EVA assembly would be all over the world, and at whatever cruel twist of fate that had left the only prototype of the only transport aircraft large enough to take an EVA a smoking crater in the Siberian wilderness, without any replacement in sight.

And there would have to be a Task Force, because no one in their right mind would send a carrier anywhere unescorted, especially through what remained of Indonesia. Thankfully, this too would not be up to her to organize. Misato sighed again. Seconds later, her feet where up on her desk and her stomach was yearning for one of the beers that awaited her in her fridge. Assuming Pe Pe hadn't drunk what was left.

"Note to self: Go shopping."

Someone knocked on the door to her office instead of using the buzzer. There was exactly one person that did this, and she sighed. His need to be special.

"Get in here, Kaji, before I make you eat my boots."

Sure enough, the person walking into her office with a self-assured smirk that annoyed her whenever she saw it, a ruggedly handsome face that hadn't been clean-shaven since his sixteenth birthday was none other than NERV-1's Chief of Security and Counter-intelligence, Ryoji Kaji.

"Why is that, Major? Is something annoying you?"

Aside from just about everything about him?

"I need your help." Misato said grudgingly, knowing full well that this favour would cost her. And he knew it, because there was no one else who would dare just sit on her damn table and steal half her salted Cashew nuts.

"Do you now?" he replied, with that same insufferable smirk. Why in all the hells of the world did he still manage to get under her skin like this, all this time after they'd… known each other in college?

"Sadly, yes. And it isn't really for your post as Chief of Security."

He grinned and Misato narrowed her eyes.

"Keep your mind out of the gutter, Ryoji." she snapped, and he became serious.

"What is it?"

"I'm supposed to be handling the cleanup of the fight, but the Commander asked me to do this… somewhat unofficially. It's EVA-02."

He frowned. "Are the Germans causing issues? That's not like them."

Misato shook her head. "No, that part went fine. Fuyutsuki told me that getting them to send the Unit, pilot and crew to Japan was easy, but the process of getting it [I]here[/I] is something else."

"I think I know what you're getting at, Major. You want me to see what I can do to speed up the bureaucracy?"

"Of course not, Chief. Circumventing UNAD command structure and protocols is against regulations, and I would never do such a thing. Which is why I haven't given you this outline of our requirements."

"I see, Major. Which is why I won't make a few phone calls to some old friends." he said after considering this for a moment and reading the document. "If I did such a thing, I wouldn't be making any promises though, but see what I could do."

"And I would appreciate it."

His joking demeanour disappeared. "I think that makes us even."

Misato knew how he meant that, and so she didn't rip his head off.

"Thank you."

"I don't envy you or the Commander, Misato. So, if you ever need my help, just call."

So spoken to, Misato chanced looking at him directly. "Will do."

Ryoji checked his wristwatch. "Ooookay, it's almost six here, so it should be ten in the evening at NERV-2 and threeish in New York… I'll wait until later tonight to shop around,"

"SIX?" Misato yelled, and jumped to her feet. "Shit!" Cursing as she went, she shut down her terminal before dragging him out of her office. "I'm supposed to pick up the third child from hospital today and get him settled, and I don't want to be late."

"How did he do? I heard he keeled over afterwards."

"But only afterwards, Ryoji." Her answer came with a shake of her head. "He's someone who didn't even know EVAs existed until twenty-four hours ago, never mind had any training on one, and that's before we take a combat situation into account. I really expected him to faint right off the bat or make a run for it the moment he saw the Angel."

"So we have a new Rei on our hands?"

With a snort, Misato slapped him lightly on his shoulder. "Hardly. He was quivering in his seat the entire time, his marksmanship was almost as bad as the Russians at Tsushima, and his vitals were at the edge of the red. Getting him to a place where he can do this every other day is… not going to be easy."

"I don't know if I should pity him for having to go through your version of basic training, but-"

"It's not like him or us have a choice." Sighing and desperately yearning for a beer, she wished herself back to this morning, when the thought of fighting an Angel for her very right to exist had been a theoretical exercise that she trained for, but that a small part of her believed would probably never happen. "I just wish we didn't have to send out those kids to go and die for us. I don't envy them the nightmares."

"The world isn't perfect, Misato."

"Sucks, doesn't it."

"Extremely."

This time, Major Katsuragi was much more sedate in her driving, but unlike the last time he had been in her car, Shinji didn't really pay attention. He was staring out of the window, imagining himself back in his own bed in America. Getting released from hospital had taken almost as long as the examinations before… before it had happened, and Shinji, knowing that complaining would only make everything take even longer, had endured it with far more grace than he could have previously imagined himself to be capable of. Mother had been surprisingly nice too, by her standards at least, and kept her part of the two-hour de-briefing short and confined. By then, Shinji had wanted nothing more than a real shower and getting settled somewhere that was not on this base. He still wore the same clothes he'd put on a little more than a day ago. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

At that thought, even being physically and mentally exhausted, Shinji couldn't help a small sigh. Way to sound like a cliché, man.

He grew even more embarrassed when the rumbling of his very empty stomach was clearly audible even over the roar of the engine and the soft J-pop warbling out of the car's radio.

"I'm… I'm sorry, Misato."

She'd insisted he call her when off-base the moment she'd told him that they would be room-mates. Knowing better than to expect anything else from Mother, as much as he may have wanted to be close to her, Shinji had accepted that without complaint.

"Don't worry. We can go for something to eat once you're all settled in, because my fridge is pretty empty." she said, trying to sound not too apologetic.

Shinji raised his head from the headrest and looked back at her. "I think I know why you didn't get around to do the shopping."

"Wow, and he does have a sense of humour after all!" Misato's laughter at that was infectious, and Shinji smiled, even though he hadn't tried to be funny.

And so it happened that he followed Misato into the insides of a residential complex from the front parking lot, nodding at her neighbours as they went. Like most such buildings, it looked outwardly generic, to say the least. The building itself was a lot wider than it was high. Semi-recessed into a hillside and providing each flat with a balcony that would have ample sunlight in the afternoons. The flat that had the Major's name on the plaque near the door was at the very edge of the building, so they had to walk a fair bit from the staircase, because of course the elevator was broken. Misato opened the door and stepped in, but before Shinji had a chance to do the same, she reached to the side and handed him a spare key without saying a word. He nodded as a way of saying thanks and followed her in. The corridor opened up into a combination kitchen/dining-room area, where there was a number of dirty dishes still in the sink and an arrangement of stacked liquor bottles and beer cans of just about every brand sold in Japan, reaching from the floor to halfway up the wall. What caught his attention though was a penguin waddling out from a storage closet, over to the fridge and taking it's only content, a half-empty tupperware box of what smelled lick pickled fish before waddling back after only glancing at the stranger staring at him.

"Yeah, that's Pen Pen." Misato said, as if that was any sort of explanation. Shinji didn't expect anything else and just shook his head. One more thing in an already utterly crazy week. A penguin able to open doors was just another thing, so instead of freaking out, he followed Misato through the living room into a short corridor that had two doors going off to the sides. Shinji was given yet another key, this time for the one that had it's own access to the balcony.

"Come on, put your stuff in there, and let's go get something to eat."

"Okay."

The place they ended up in was next to the supermarket Misato seemed to frequent noowhere near often enough, and the sort of mom and pop ramen shop he barely remembered from his childhood. He ordered his favourite kind, and with the first taste, he grinned, feeling better already. And not only because of the food, but also because the shop itself reminded him of the small hole-in-the-wall place that he'd gone to at least twice a week in Neo-Frisco after school. Somehow he doubted he'd find a Wendy's when exploring this town.

For several minutes he was so focused on eating that he didn't actually notice that Misato had fallen silent. Eventually, the silence in their booth penetrated his food-induced bliss. On looking up, he saw her leaning back in a corner, a can of beer in het hand and mustering him with a smirk. He swallowed and looked back. "What?"

"Nothing, it's just nice to see you act like a normal sixteen year old."

He opened his mouth and was about to apologize, again, but thought better of it. She was right, he did feel a lot more comfortable than he had at any point since he had found the letter from Japan stuck in-between the frame and door of his room. He knew it wouldn't last, at the latest when he had to face his mother again, but right then, right there? Yes, he felt good for someone stuck in a bad mecha anime.

"I guess." Shinji paused and neatly placed his chopsticks on the edge of the bowl. He hesitated and stared at it's contents for a moment before looking at Misato. "Can I ask you something?"

"Of course."

For Misato, the next minute or so was one of silent contemplation, but it was obvious that Shinji was trying to gather his nerves. Eventually, he took a deep breath and looked at her. "Do you think I'm any good as a pilot?"

Usually, the question would have made her give a quick answer, either truthful or not, depending on the person doing the asking, but the way Shinji had said it, and the way she'd seen him interact with his mother… a little bit of positive reinforcement was in order here. She slammed her can down on the table and leaned over her own food. With a low voice, wanting to hide his identity as a pilot, she answered.

"Kid, let me tell you something. It took Rei a weeks of simulator hours to get to the point where Unit-00 could walk upright reliably. I don't know what makes you different, but on your first outing, with no training at all, you did well enough to survive and keep the Angel busy until Rei was ready to fire. So yeah, you did good."

"Thank you, Misato. It means something."

He grinned and said nothing else. As she watched Shinji inhale the rest of his food, Misato was forced to admit to herself that there was more to him than his file suggested. Self-worth issues up the wazoo, yes, desperate eager to please, also true, yet someone who was nice, polite and likeable, with just enough self assurance to make it really interesting when he and the Second Child ever met.

On realizing who would have to play referee then, Misato groaned, let her head bang on the table and ordered another beer.

**tbc**

**1) Why yes, the Crew Chief assigned to EVA-01 is a fan of a certain Galaxy that's far, far away. His existence is another one of the things I'm changing in the background there. How often he appears and what role he ends up playing, as well as his more detailed background is still somewhat up in the air though.**

**2) 'Ritsuko cares' is not something I planned out. Once again, my fingers ran away with the story. Doesn't help that she's one of those characters I really don't know what to think about in terms of where she stands on things. I've seen her portrayed every which way, and I think from here on out, I'll try to let this part of her character go where ever it ends up. Too ridiculous and I'm going to put a stop to it though.**

**3) The flat is pretty much the same layout as the canon one (going off the article on as I have difficulties picturing rooms like that from description alone), with the exception that the spare rooms aren't quite as different in size and both have a window.**


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Alfa-Five**

Rei knew better than to ask Doctor Ikari about the Third Child. So instead of doing that, she merely watched as he was put on a stretcher and taken away from the cages. What she saw left her conflicted. Which was something she hated. She didn't feel jealous that the Third had displayed an innate talent for piloting, or that he had taken the aftermath of his first plug separation a lot better than her. She knew why her own experience with the first sync test had been the way it was, circumstances that did not and could not apply to the Third.

After hours of getting the usual medical checkups, answering questions and writing preliminary reports, Rei found herself on the highest point of NERV-1. The pyramid was not a perfect example of that geometric shape, instead the top was a quadratic platform festooned with the working ends of some of the various communications systems that linked the base to the outside world. The platform was high enough to afford a view to the other side of Tokyo Bay and the ships steering for Tokyo-2. Not as much as Nagoya and Yokohama, but it was considerable. High up in the air, she could see a flight of four JSSDF VTOLs patrolling the area, though she was unsure what they were looking for. The other side only showed her the open sea, but as she stared over to where the island chain of Hawaii beckoned half a world away, a small and exceptionally rare smile crept on her face.

It had been the first time she had been seen as more than a means to an end, as an actual person, which had taken the sting of failure away from her. Minutes after setting foot on Ohahu, before she ever even saw her target in the harbour, she had felt a sting, and then nothing at all for several hours. Only to wake up in a dimly lit room, tied to a chair and surrounded by angry UNAD soldiers and US Marines pointing guns at her. It had been the first time Rei had feared for her life, because thanks to the drugs used to tranquillize her, she had barely been able to remember her own name, or understand the questions someone was yelling at her. All Rei had done at that moment was to sit still in the chair, with silent tears streaming down her cheeks. Her inability to answer questions about things that she did not know or could not remember, her inability to do anything but cry and yell the longer this experience dragged on, it all made it worse. The man on the other side of the room had stepped closer and yelled at her while close enough to her face that Rei could feel his breath on her skin. Somehow, Rei still could not actually remember the exact words, but his voice had been seared into her mind.

She still didn't know how long it lasted, but the lights had turned on and someone had started yelling at the guards instead. A tall woman in a white lab coat had pushed her way through the assembled crowd and had knelt down next to a ten year old Rei that was as close to bawling as she was capable of. Doctor Ikari's words were just as blurred in her memories as the rest of that day, but Rei could and would never forget the first time she had been hugged in her life, or the affection that came with it.

"Rei?"

"Yes, Doctor?"

"Will the presence of my son create problems for you?"

She glanced up at the taller woman and saw what she thought was genuine concern on Doctor Ikari's face.

"No, Doctor. The Third Child's presence is not problematic for me, nor is mine for him." Rei replied with a curt nod. She turned away to look at the bay where a cruise ship was making a much-delayed departure, but for the briefest of moments, no longer than half a second, the mask on Doctor Ikari's face slipped and Rei saw the utter and total relief out of the corner of her eye. Interesting.

The moment was over as quickly as it began and her erstwhile guardian looked at her, face stern and rigid, as Rei knew it to be when she wanted to make a point and ensure that it stuck. "Good, because NERV-1 needs him. NERV-2 is preparing to move EVA-02 and the Second Child from Europe, but until they get here, the defence of this installation rests on the shoulders of the two of you."

"Yes, Doctor."

"Until the start of the School year, he will be started on improving his physical condition as well as being taught basic combat tactics. I need you to work with and assist him if so required."

"Of course."

Rei nodded slightly. It was a promise she would gladly make, because she had been wondering about the Third Child since first coming to Hawaii, and one of the first thing she'd learned not to do among NERV-1 staff was to ask after or speculate about him. Shinji Ikari had been one of the great mysteries and even legends with the staff she had grown up among, and even today she had not known who the pilot of EVA-01 had been until Major Katsuragi, blissfully unaware of the whole story, had introduced them. Not that the Major was to blame for this oversight, she was too much of a professional to let her curiosity get the better of her and was blissfully unaware of the entirety of Rei's background.

For herself, Shinji had always been someone she had been keenly aware of, willingly or not, but at the same time she knew that she would never get a full, complete answer.

What she had told his mother was accurate, she harboured no ill feelings or intentions towards him. What she felt was curiosity. In all the time she had spent with Doctor Ikari over the years, she had heard his name only four times, and every time itt had been made clear to her that asking any more would not be appreciated. So she hadn't asked and instead wondered, and it seemed now she was about to find out.

"Shinji is not just a talented pilot, Rei, but he is also my son. Remember that."

The thinly veiled threat was obvious even to Rei, and also very surprising. She kept that part to herself, only mumbling "I will." in response.

"Just don't mention his so-called father to him."

Rei had no intention to do so.

A shiver of fear ran down her spine.

* * *

**From: akagi-riso**

**To: ikari-yui**

**cc:**

**Subject: Third Child preliminary**

**Attachments**

**full_prelim_eval_**

**counter_sync_**

**counter_sync_**

Yui,

do please remember that while I minored in psychology, I'm a neurologist by trade, and if you want a full evaluation to bring the Third's file up to date, we need to wait for Doctor Park to come back from sick leave next month. No, I'm not going to pull him in early, the man's had spinal surgery. He's a lot more qualified, and what I've scribbled together should not be taken as gospel. The full report is in the attachment, but I've summarized it here, in no particular order. And remember, you told me you wanted the full, uncensored version.

1)

Shinji's definitely not as desperate for affection and approval by pretty much anyone around him as he used to be, certainly not in the way the old file indicates. I shudder to think what would have happened if you'd been killed back then. He's withdrawn, quiet and I'd even call him shy when it comes to the other half of humanity. The one person he desperately wants approval of is you, his mother. He has done and will do a lot of things for that reason alone.

His biggest issue right now is that he blames himself for getting sent to live in America, and though he hasn't said it out loud, a small part of him thinks he did something that earned your ire to the point where you hated and disapproved of him enough to send him away. We both know that's not true, but it's what he thinks and why he often apologizes for things that aren't even remotely his fault.

Conversely, I think it's also an at least partial reason for why he forced himself into the Entry Plug even if everything about this told him to run the other way as fast as he could. Yui, that boy was [I]scared[/I] to his bones, but he fought anyway. He fought because he wants you to approve of him. He's still beating himself up over the way he thinks he failed us in the fight, and he's determined. For what I'm not sure, but next time the alarm goes off, he'll be there and he'll do his best.

I think you have Riku to thank for Shinji being a very damaged, but overall positive and likeable boy. He's definitely inherited your brother's taste in music and Showa-era kaiju movies.

That said, he's bound to be curious about his father and he has to potential to be apocalyptically furious, so keep that in mind.

2)

In terms of the aftermath of being forced into a fight the first time he synced with an EVA, his scans and every other test I've run tell me he's fine. Shinji's neuro-scans are all well within the safety margins, there's no nerve inflammation from excess feedback, and he doesn't have any bodily injuries either.

His getting a higher sync rate than even the Second Child the first time he gets into the plug is hardly surprising all things considered, but he's shown himself to have an innate for piloting an EVA. I'm honestly surprised he fell over only once and after that displayed the sort of control I'd expect from someone having gone through the same pilot training as the First and Second Children have. Those two had to learn how to walk all over again, and he merely went in, fumbled the controls a bit and fell over once. Long story short, with some training, he's going to be one hell of a pilot. Remind me to buy some popcorn for when Asuka finds out that her spot's been taken.

Beyond that, we've checked the interface systems and the control core in EVA-01 and what we've found fits in with what our tests on Shinji have revealed so far. Counter-sync is within two percent of Shinji's sync rate. Taking the technological limitations of the EVA Cores into account, that's well within the margin, but I recommend that your people keep an eye on it just in case, because this level of initial counter-sync is just as unprecedented. I've also attached the raw data for your perusal, but I don't expect your conclusions to be different from my own.

Akagi

* * *

**Somewhere**

The room was arranged so that someone standing in the middle would have been confronted by a half-circle of twelve black marble monoliths, but Gendo Ikari knew that these were only holographic representations of what they looked like. Even if they had been real, he would not have felt intimidated by them. Whatever the twelve scared old men behind the numbers engraved on the monoliths believed, he was answering to a more ultimate, higher authority. Occasionally they needed reminding of that, but today was not such a moment.

Failure was something he had become unaccustomed to in the last few years, but this was because he knew how to pick his battles, having learned this in the most painful manner possible. SEELE on the other hand had yet to do so.

Hopefully the recent failure would work towards that.

_"It seems that we underestimated the defences of NERV-1, as well as the strength of their weapons."_

Gendo knew the unstated blame, but decided to let it slip this time. "The intelligence reports we received insisted on only Unit-00 being operational, and there was no mention of a second pilot being recruited in time. With the information available, this could not be anticipated."

The same monolith, Number 4, spoke again. _"Even so, we were told that the new generation AT fields would be impervious to UNAD's weapons."_

He would never admit to them that he had been as surprised as anyone when the Third Angel had fallen the way it had. So instead of doing so, he pushed his glasses back up his nose to give himself a moment to consider his response. Eventually he spoke. "I am confident that the AT fields remain impervious against UNAD's conventional forces," he said, "and I am sure that Commander Fuyutsuki will give us ample opportunity to prove this. I am convinced the only reasons UNAD and JSSDF forces did not oppose us today was the element of surprise. NERV-1 is sure to insist on a more permanent solution now."

_"So is the Fourth Angel on schedule?"_ Eleven was one of the more reasonable ones, which was why Gendo dignified him with an accurate and full reply.

"Not completely at the moment, but I am confident that it will be deployable on time." he said, declining to tack on the 'unless you intrude on my timetable again.', instead he decided to keep that in his backpocket for when they inevitably would intrude. He knew that his employers would back him, and ultimately, SEELE and every one of it's members were replaceable, even if they thought different.

_"What about the reports that the Third Child that has been recruited is Shinji Ikari?"_

"They will not figure into our scenario, if true." Gendo said this with a voice that was emotionless even for his standards, "but the Angels will be victorious all the same."

_"See that they are, Professor."_

One after another, the monoliths blinked out and left Gendo alone in the room. Even though no one could see him, he refused to lett what he felt be displayed. Instead, he walked over to the only two pieces of furniture in the room, his desk and the chair behind it. He sat down and assumed his almost subconscious thinking pose, tenting his hands in front of his mouth.

'What were you thinking Yui, recruiting That Boy?'

It was bound to be a disaster, too fast for the scenario to play out the way he wanted to, and he would have to deal with him eventually. Not that he was troubled by the prospect, but it was yet another complication he had to deal with. He was certain that his plans would develop to his satisfaction anyway, but he hated having to deal with additional unforeseen complications. Still, That Boy was still as useless now as he had been back then, so his presence with NERV-1 wouldn't be much of a factor. The next Angel would take care of him.

Gendo smiled.

**tbc**

**So yeah, Gendo is still alive.**


End file.
